RFI.docx

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (DHS)

U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION (CBP)

Data Center Support Services (DCSS)

Description of Intent

This Request for Information (RFI) is issued solely for informational and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids, Request for Proposal, or Request for Quotes. In accordance with FAR 15.201(e), responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract. Additionally, the U.S. Government will not provide reimbursement for any information that may be submitted in response to this RFI. Respondents are solely responsible for all expenses associated with responding to this RFI, and any submissions to this notice will not result in an evaluation or rating by the Government.

The Government’s explicit intent, in this request for information, is to not receive from respondents any proprietary data, trade secrets, business sensitive information, or information considered CONFIDENTIAL under 18 U.S.C. §1905. The Government’s constraint does not in any way relieve contractor’s from their responsibility to properly mark proprietary data when it is provided, nor does it alleviate any requirement for the Government to protect marked data. The Government is not obligated to protect unmarked data.

Respondents shall ensure that any material/data that is provided is marked appropriately to ensure proper handling of all information. Unless otherwise noted herein, anything submitted in response to this RFI will not be returned to the sender. Respondents will not be notified of the results of the survey or results of information submitted, nor will it respond to telephone or email inquiries.

Background

The mission of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is to provide information, services, and technology solutions to secure the border, prevent the entry of terrorists or terrorist weapons, and to ensure the efficient flow of lawful people and trade across U.S. borders. OIT provides the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CBP with a 24x7x365 secure, stable and high-performance information technology infrastructure, scientific solutions, and forensic services.

OIT has the responsibility for identifying and evaluating new technologies for applications in support of CBP business processes. A new era of economic and terrorist threats require systems that can support the future vision of a unified, integrated, intelligence-driven agency to protect the United States against all threats. In order to be successful, a new Government and Contractor team must identify and acquire highly-skilled professionals from across industry that are capable of leading the technological revolution currently underway within OIT systems and applications.

Highlights of current efforts:

· Improving system availability to include re-engineering the current CBP infrastructure environments to provide local and geographic redundancies at the server, storage, network, database, and application layers. The availability and reliability of CBP’s mission critical application services is vital to supporting the screening of passengers and cargo coming into the United States.

· Implementing the ITIL framework to establish best practices through a set of concepts, strategies, policies and procedures for managing the CBP information technology infrastructure, development and operations environments;

· Implementing Agile practices, in conjunction with our required DHS System Engineering Life Cycle, supports the practice of shorter and more succinct software/system delivery;

· Modernizing storage and media providing cost effective highly reliable, highly scalable, highly available, cost effective storage and backup solutions with capacity on demand;

· Continuing to modernize the CBP monitoring systems to provide auto discovery, automatic business processing groupings and threshold and failure alerts to enable the Enterprise Data Center Operations Group to proactively and un-disruptively respond to capacity and performance thresholds and hardware failures;

· Supporting modernization of systems such as the TECS, Passenger systems, Cargo systems, Automated Commercial Environment (ACE);

· Engineering, implementing and operating clusters of highly available and scalable commodity servers that host discrete services which are leveraged by multiple projects; and

· Transitioning and migrating production CBP systems and applications to operate at multiple data centers (including but not limited to Department of Homeland Security Data Centers, CBP Sponsored Data Centers, and commercially provided Data Centers).

· CBP data center processing is performed at multiple data centers within the continental United States. Data centers currently providing services to CBP include the following - the CBP National Data Center (NDC) Complex located in Springfield, Virginia; the Stennis Data Center (DC1) at Space Center in Mississippi (supports multiple DHS Agencies, including CBP); the DHS Data Center 2 (DC2) in Clarksville, Virginia (supports multiple DHS Agencies, including CBP); the Finance Center located in Indianapolis, Indiana; and other locations throughout the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Database Services The primary focus of Database Services is to proactively design, implement and support all areas and components of Database infrastructure. Database Services currently supports and manages Datacom/DB, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Informatica on Z/OS. These services include reliability, availability, scalability, capacity on demand, performance optimization, inter-operability, problem analysis/resolution, configuration management, disaster recovery, capacity planning, operational redundancy, contingency planning, integration, and operations of all components across the CBP Database enterprise architecture. Support services are required for a standards-based Database infrastructure that is designed to provide CBP’s business partners, users, and other government agencies the ability to process information rapidly and securely while ensuring data integrity, data security, and delivery.

Data Center Support Services will integrate, implement, operate, administer, support, and maintain all components of the CBP enterprise Database infrastructure. This task includes (1) supporting a scalable efficient infrastructure that can automatically provision resources and services; (2) administering, managing and maintaining all database software (e.g. database systems and third party software products); (3) monitoring and maintaining database performance; (4) create user accounts and grant access permissions after receiving authorization from appropriate CBP resources: (5) providing system stability and uninterrupted systems availability; (6) providing improved system response times and improved processing throughput: and (7) providing Database Administration services for all non-production and production database environments which may include defining schemas, tables, indexes etc.

In coordination with and support of the migration of CBP applications off of the Mainframe, the Contractor shall support the migration from legacy databases (ie., Datacom/DB, and IBM DB2) to the database target standard Oracle DB residing on Oracle Exadata devices and/or commodity infrastructure. The Contractor shall support the Migration of Databases to the Commercial Cloud, and shall also provide the engineering and supporting of Databases located in Commercial Cloud infrastructure as a hybrid expansion of the CBP Cloud Computing Environment. This task includes the development and deployment of automation (ie, scripts and/or software products) that further automates manual recurring business processes with the goal of reducing the manpower needed to support Database Operations.

The anticipated scope of these services will support the engineering and operations of products and services across the CBP enterprise. The primary objective is to provide 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year (24x7x365) systems availability and reliability. Work shall be conducted in accordance with all DHS/CBP/OIT policies, standards, directives, processes, procedures and practices. This includes working with CBP Government and Contractor personnel, other government agencies, and vendors to support DHS/CBP/OIT mission and goals. The Agile methods of project management of automated systems shall be used to develop work products / artifacts that are compliant with current and future DHS/CBP/OIT policies, standards, processes, procedures, and guidelines.

CBP data center processing is performed at multiple data centers within the continental United States, with the primary operating location for contractors at NDC (Springfield, VA).

The Government retains all authority over access to systems and applications developed by industry partners.

Applicable Documents/Constraints The following DHS/CBP/OIT policies, standards, directives, processes and procedures are applicable for all work performed:

· DHS Acquisition Instruction/Guidebook #102-01-001: Appendix B, Systems Engineering Life Cycle, and support CBP processes found in online Process Asset Library (PAL);

· DHS Sensitive Systems Policy 4300A;

· DHS National Security Systems Policy Handbook 4300B;

· DHS National Security Systems Policy 4300 B;

· DHS National Security Systems Handbook 4300 B;

· CBP Information Systems Security Policies and Procedures Handbook (HB 1400-05D);

· Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 199, Standards for Security Categorization of Federal Information and Information Systems;

· CBP OIT Change Management Handbook;

· CBP Technical Reference Model (TRM);

· DHS Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Standards;

· DHS Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Standards;

· Federal Enterprise Architecture;

· National Information Exchange Model (NIEM);

· International Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Standards; and

· Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Best Practices;

· Agile Development Methodology.

The contractor can also anticipate providing support necessary to meet all requirements in the Draft Statement of Work (SOW) attached to this RFI.

Submission of Responses - Instructions

Format Electronic responses are required, either via e-mail or digital media submission. Submittal shall be in Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat. The size limit for individual e-mails is 10MB per e-mail. You may use multiple e-mail messages. The subject line must include the message number (example: 1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3) and “[Company Name] Response to RFI – DCSS Data Center Services.” Responses may include, as backup/support, company marketing materials, reports, and/or other materials that were prepared for purposes other than this RFI. Responses shall address application, readiness, affordability, and performance of each question.

Requested Information

1. Business / Administrative Information:

Company name:

Business address:

Company web address:

Company Point of Contact (POC):

Name:

Title:

Telephone:

Email address:

Location of facilities:

2. The overall purpose of this RFI is to determine the industrial landscape for Data Center Support Services to further define any future applicable CBP requirement. CBP also encourages responses to this RFI to provide thorough and innovative solutions to satisfy the DCSS requirements. In order for the Government to better understand and assess industry capabilities, respondents must address information contained within this RFI, and provide substantive responses to the following questions:

a. Upon review of the draft Statement of Work, what aspects appear technologically restrictive based on current commercial practices?

b. As referenced in 2.a, the Statement of Work is draft, and CBP is interested in recommendations for a streamlined approach of articulating the common technical support requirements without having to explicitly define each task.

c. Is a performance-based approach more appropriate?

d. Is a single-vendor solution feasible, or is a multiple-vendor solution more appropriate?

e. What socio-economic type of business do you represent for these types of services, and under what NAICS code(s)?

f. What applicable Government or Department-wide contract vehicles do you anticipate having in the next 12 months and when does the vehicle’s period of performance end?

g. What specific examples of similar solutions are you aware of, and what experience does your organization have performing them?

h. What types of data center services have you automated at other agencies, and how long did it take for you to fully implement the automation? Note: This question is related to automating manual processes, such as the creation and configuration of virtual machines/databases/Continuous Integration of software code, patching of Windows/Unix/WebLogic/WebSphere/Oracle and SQL Databases.

i. What is your Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) annual price estimate for these services over the next five years?

j. Can you identify any cost drivers for this requirement?

k. Can you identify risks and potential mitigations or alternate solutions?

l. Please recommend a contract type, and provide support for your recommendation.

Due Date for Responses Electronic responses to this RFI must be received NO LATER THAN COB 3 weeks from publication date of TBD. Please submit all responses and any questions prior to full response to Gary Robertson via email at Gary.R.Robertson@cbp.dhs.gov.